Sarah Boone: The Suitcase, the Videos She Filmed, and a Life Sentence

The 911 call came in at 1:01 p.m. on February 24, 2020. Sarah Boone told the dispatcher she had found her boyfriend dead inside a suitcase in their Winter Park, Florida apartment. They had been drinking the night before, she said, and playing hide-and-seek. He climbed into the suitcase. She fell asleep upstairs.

Jorge Torres Jr. was 42 years old. He had suffocated.

The account might have held, except for one thing: Boone had filmed it. On her own phone, from the other side of the zipper, she had recorded the man inside the bag begging to be let out.

The night: a suitcase, and the hours that followed

Torres was zipped into the luggage on the night of February 23, 2020, and left there. Prosecutors would later allege that Boone also struck him with a baseball bat that night, and that she left him inside the suitcase until he died of asphyxiation.

Her version to police was a drunken game gone wrong — that both of them had thought it would be funny for him to get in, that she went upstairs, that she woke hours later to find him unresponsive. It is the version she carried into the interrogation room, and it is the version the videos on her phone contradicted.

The videos she recorded herself

The recordings are the reason this case is known nationally. They show the suitcase, zipped, with Torres inside it. He can be heard pleading to be released. He tells her, in words investigators would replay for a jury, that he cannot breathe. He pushes against the fabric trying to get out.

Boone is heard laughing. She taunts him. At no point in the footage does she unzip the bag.

Asked at trial why she didn't let him out, she gave an answer that prosecutors would return to: "I wanted him to try to understand how I felt so maybe he could progress and be a better person."

For how investigators use a suspect's own recordings and statements against them, see our breakdown of how police interrogations actually work.

The defense: battered spouse syndrome

Boone's trial defense, led by attorney James Owens, did not dispute that Torres died in the suitcase. It argued about why.

The defense presented Boone as a woman subjected to years of domestic violence — describing a relationship in which she had been kicked, punched, and choked — and argued she suffered from battered spouse syndrome. A forensic psychologist testified that her conduct that night should be read as a product of sustained trauma rather than malice.

It is a genuine legal doctrine, and in some cases it succeeds. Here it did not. The gap the defense could never close was the eleven-odd hours between the zipper closing and the 911 call — and the sound of her own voice on the recordings.

The case also became notable for its churn of counsel. Boone cycled through a long series of defense attorneys before, during, and after trial; by the time her appeal was docketed, reporting placed her on her thirteenth lawyer.

The verdict and the life sentence

Jury selection began on October 14, 2024, after Hurricane Milton delayed the start. The trial ran before Judge Michael Kraynick in Orange County. On October 25, 2024, the jury convicted Sarah Boone of second-degree murder.

On December 2, 2024, Judge Kraynick sentenced her to life in prison.

She addressed the court before the sentence came down. "I forgive myself for falling in love with a monster," she said. "And no matter how grotesque he may become, I still loved him, hoped and forgave."

Torres's family spoke too. His mother told the court that Boone "not only killed my son, she killed a father, a brother, an uncle." His daughter, Ana Victoria, described living since with chronic depression and anxiety.

If the distinction between the charge and the conviction is unfamiliar, our explainer on charged versus convicted walks through what each term actually means.

Where the case stands now

Boone's conviction is on appeal and remains unresolved.

The case is docketed in Florida's Sixth District Court of Appeal as 6D2025-0206, arising from Orange County circuit case 2020-CF-002603. The appeal moved slowly: on February 5, 2026, the court granted a further 60 days to serve the initial brief and warned that no additional extensions would follow absent extenuating circumstances. The initial brief was filed in April 2026, and the State's answer brief followed.

As of this writing, no appellate decision has been issued. An appeal is not a retrial, and the vast majority end with the conviction left standing — we walk through what actually happens at that stage in what happens at an appeal hearing. We're tracking the ruling on our court dates tracker.

Why this case file matters

Most homicide cases are reconstructed after the fact — from autopsy findings, from cell records, from the testimony of people who arrived once it was over. This one was documented while it was happening, by the person a jury later held responsible.

That is what makes it unusual, and it is also what made the defense so difficult. A jury asked to accept that a killing was the product of fear had to weigh that against a recording of laughter. Between the zipper and the 911 call there were hours in which the bag could have been opened by anyone standing next to it, and the only person standing next to it was holding a phone.

Sources & records

• CNN: Sarah Boone sentenced to life in prison
• ABC11: sentencing, trial evidence, and family statements
• Court TV: FL v. Sarah Boone trial coverage and updates
• FOX 35 Orlando: the original Winter Park case and 911 account
• Spectrum News 13: sentencing day coverage

Case status as of this writing: convicted of second-degree murder on October 25, 2024, in Orange County, Florida; sentenced December 2, 2024, by Judge Michael Kraynick to life in prison; direct appeal pending in Florida's Sixth District Court of Appeal (case 6D2025-0206), initial brief filed April 2026 and State's answer filed, with no decision issued. This article is based on trial proceedings, court records, and contemporaneous reporting. Video: Camviction's case breakdown, including the footage recovered from Boone's phone.